Emotional crowd bids Yasser Arafat farewell

Emotional crowd bids Yasser Arafat farewell

Agencies, Ramallah, West Bank/Gaza City

Surging frenzied crowds forced a hasty burial of Yasser Arafat on Friday, preventing mourners like student Deya Jamal from paying their last respects to the charismatic Palestinian president.

"Until now, I could not believe that Abu Ammar had died. I cannot imagine Palestine without him. It's going to be very hard," said 19-year-old Jamal after officials scrapped plans to let his body lie in state due to the chaos.

Arafat was laid to rest in his half-demolished West Bank compound where Israeli forces cooped him up in the final two-and- a-half years of his roller-coaster life as guerrilla chief, Nobel Peace price winner and aging president.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian mourners mobbed the Muqata compound and many swarmed past overwhelmed security forces to greet a helicopter alighting with his coffin after a military funeral attended by Arab and world leaders in Cairo.

Scores of militants in Arafat's Fatah nationalist movement fired assault rifles into the air in salute. Security men in red and green berets also fired rounds aloft in vain efforts to drive back the crowd of wailing, jostling, chanting people.

"We will sacrifice our blood and souls to redeem you, oh Abu Ammar (Arafat's nom de guerre)," they chanted and "Yasser Yasser", clapping their hands in time to the chant.

Palestinian officials traveling with the coffin appeared at the helicopter door and pleaded for throngs to disperse but security forces seemed to lose control. Melees broke out and it appeared the burial would be delayed.

After about a half hour, security men squeezed Arafat's coffin out of the helicopter and ploughed into a jostling sea of people trying to touch the flag-draped casket.

The coffin was then hoisted onto a jeep amidst the heaving crowd. Armed security men climbed onto the car to clutch the coffin for fear it would slip off into the mob.

A Palestinian flag draping the flag was torn away in the confusion and someone threw a black-and-white checked keffiyah (headdress), resembling the one Arafat always wore, over the casket as a symbolic substitute.

It was to have been taken into the Muqata's main entry hall to lie in state but instead it was whisked straight to the tree- shaded grave site of white marble. Rubble from past Israeli shellings of the compound was cleared to make room for the tomb.

"He was buried ahead of time because of the emotion of the crowd. We had no choice," one official told Reuters.

Nine people were wounded, one critically, by gunshots fired wildly into the air. Hundreds of mourners were treated by medics after fainting in the crush or falling off walls.

The "Muqata" became a symbol of resistance for Palestinians as Israel effectively marooned Arafat there, accusing him of inciting violence in a four-year-old Palestinian uprising -- which he denied.

Arafat, reviled by most Israelis as an "arch-terrorist", died on Thursday at 75 after suffering a brain hemorrhage at the Paris hospital to which he was airlifted from the Muqata on Oct. 29 after falling gravely ill.

Arafat had wanted to be laid to rest at an Islamic shrine in Arab, East Jerusalem. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ruled this out, calculating it would have solidified Palestinians' claim to the city as the capital of a state they seek in occupied lands.

Meanwhile, Arafat's wife, Suha, did not attend his burial service in the West Bank on Friday, choosing instead to stay on in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, Palestinian political sources said.

"She decided to stay on to receive condolences," one source told AFP. "She is then going to go back to either France or Tunisia" where she divides her time.

Several thousand Palestinians in Gaza City marched behind a mock funeral procession for Arafat on Friday, frustrated at missing the veteran leader's actual burial in the West Bank.

Scheduled to run simultaneously with events in Ramallah, the ceremony began at the Omari mosque, one of the oldest in the sprawling Mediterranean city, but many Palestinians stayed at home, glued to their television sets to watch the real deal.